For seven short years, a coffeehouse in Greenwich Village called Limelight was at the center of the art-photography world. There, owner Helen Gee exhibited the works of such luminaries as Harry Callahan, Bill Brandt, Imogen Cunningham, and Lisette Model at a time when photography was not yet considered an art, and the sticker prices on the prints were a mere fraction of what they'd be today. Limelight is Gee's memoir, a story about the coffeehouse she started, the people she knew, and the times in which she lived.
Even without the coffeehouse, Gee's life is like something out of a novel: at age 16 she left home to live in Greenwich Village with a Chinese painter named Yun Gee. The late '30s and early '40s were hardly a time of racial tolerance in the United States, and so their romance was disliked as much for its interracial nature as for the age difference between the two lovers. After the birth of their daughter, Yun Gee developed schizophrenia, leaving Helen to fend for herself and her child. She did this in a variety of ways before finally hitting on the idea of opening a coffeehouse. In Limelight Gee describes the obstacles she faced in starting the place, the people she met while running it, and the eventual problems--both political and personal--that brought Limelight down. This memoir is both Gee's story and the story of the art community in 1950s, both of which are worth telling.
The New Yorker
This memoir rescues downtown bohemia from the usual Beat clichés.
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